Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • Cloud Atlas

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lana and Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer (2012)

    The novel is a tough read but what kept me going – as well as increasingly bloody-minded determination to finish the thing – was how David Mitchell develops and holds interest in each of the six stories that comprise Cloud Atlas.  If memory serves (it may not), Mitchell inserts details to connect these narratives; his larger themes emerge from them gradually.  In the book, five of the stories are divided into two parts.  The sequence in which their first halves are told is reversed with the telling of the second halves; the one story told uninterruptedly is placed after five of these ten sections.   The novel also follows a chronological sequence:  the six stories are set in the 1850s, the 1930s, the 1970s, the present day, the middle of the twenty-second century, and an undefined, post-apocalyptic age.  The structure of the journey back means that Cloud Atlas ends where it began temporally.  The piece in the middle is narrated by an old man, Zachry, and is a memoir of his youth; the introduction of this self-conscious storyteller so deep into the book has the effect of underlining the storytelling skills the novelist has already demonstrated.   The film of Cloud Atlas is in important respects diametrically opposed to Mitchell’s novel.  Zachry (Tom Hanks) is the first person to appear on screen and, nearly three hours later, the last.   Whereas Mitchell takes you deep into each story in turn, the Wachowski-Tykwer narratives (they also collaborated on the screenplay) are fragmented from the start so you never settle into any one of them.  The ‘big’ themes – of eternal recurrence, the transmigration of souls etc – are explained in voiceovers at approximately one-third and again two-thirds of the way through.   (I felt at both these points that the film might as well end there and then, even though I knew from my watch it had a long way to go.)   Having stated these themes, the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer can only reiterate the philosophical points they’ve already made:  since you’ve been told what the stories as a whole signify you can be engaged only by what happens within them.  But it’s hard to care because the stories have been fractured – their narrative substance has been subordinated to narrative style and the fracturing seems to betray a lack of confidence in the art of linear storytelling.

    Of course the film-makers (WWT for short) didn’t have to stick faithfully to the novel but the decisions they’ve made in adapting it are not only misconceived but surprising, given the level of commitment, and the stamina, they’ve needed to bring Cloud Atlas to the screen.  I guess they wanted to replicate an extraordinary narrative structure – but there’s nothing extraordinary about a movie travelling between times and places and the splintering of the stories is almost clichéd after the Inarritu pictures of recent years.  Kicking things off with an old man talking about the telling of tales immediately suggests this will be one of the subjects of the movie; showing a bit of each of the six stories makes immediately clear that these will have to be linked up.  In theory, having the same actor play different roles sounds like a good way of realising reincarnation but several people appear in more than one guise very soon so you get the point too quickly.  Then they appear in disguise – which is fundamentally contradictory to the persistence of a single presence.  After not very long, the main interest in Cloud Atlas is in trying to work out who’s hiding under an improbable exterior (the final credits, which reveal all, are more interesting than the ‘climaxes’ of the film itself) – and wondering who’ll get the worst wig and make-up job. (This is a keen competition but Tom Hanks, with a ginger toupee and sideburns, and Ben Whishaw in a bandeau, thick specs and various outgrowths of facial hair – both in the 1975 story – are leading contenders.)

    Film is as easily capable of supernaturalising the worlds it describes as it is of moving fluidly among them.  The CGI effects here are often spectacular and beautiful but this admixture of high-tech and daft disguises – the characters getting out the dressing-up box (and often choosing drag) – is very odd.  Jim Broadbent creates clear and vivid characterisations as the appropriative, past-it composer, the vanity publisher who gets locked in an old people’s home, and the ship’s captain in the 1850 section.  Ben Whishaw doesn’t spend too long as the bandeaued music-seller in 1970s California; he’s mostly the rascally composer’s amanuensis, who actually writes the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’.  The scenes between Whishaw and Broadbent are just about the only ones in the film with a real spark, although James D’Arcy, bad in Hitchcock, is good as the amanuensis’s gay lover.  David Gyasi has great dynamism as the Moriori stowaway on the Victorian ship.  Most of the better-known members of the cast – they include, as well as Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant – are remarkably uninteresting.

    There’s no denying that the novel is about enduring souls in different perishable bodies (although Mitchell has said this is meant to be ‘just a symbol really of the universality of human nature’) but WWT banalise the underlying theme.  In the book, the theme, whatever else you may think of it, is highly distinctive:  it’s presented on screen in ways that make it seem familiar from other movies.  This may be a line from the novel but, when a character in the film (Doona Bae’s twenty-second century clone) explains that, when death occurs, ‘I see it as one door closing and another door opening’, the effect isn’t even pretentious:  she sounds to have got the idea from  Maria von Trapp.   The film’s score, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, is pretentious although there’s no arguing with the power of the sequence of chords nicked from Sibelius’s Second Symphony.  People who loathe the book may well feel the movie as a whole, and its music in particular, exposes the original for what it really is but, although I’ve mixed feelings about Mitchell’s novel, I think it’s been done a disservice by WWT.  The Odeon audience reacted to the most obvious and spectacular bits of violence and the stupidest bits of comedy but they were probably relieved to have something to react to.   At the end of the film, Zachry’s grandchildren beg him to tell them another story.  It’s one of the happier moments of the film when he declines.

    24 February 2013

  • Ida

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pawel Pawlikowski (2013)

    The hook of Ida is the discovery by Anna, a young Polish novitiate, raised in an orphanage then in the convent where she is shortly to take her vows, that she is Jewish and that her parents were murdered during World War II by Polish Catholics.  In fact, this is one of two interwined stories in Pawel Pawlikowski’s film (his first feature, strange as it seems, made in the language of his native Poland).  The other story is that of Anna’s second thoughts about her vocation.  These thoughts are brought on, it seems, less by the truth of her ethnic-religious ancestry than by a different aspect of her exposure to the outside world – terra incognita until the head of the convent instructs Anna to visit her one living relative, an aunt, before she takes her vows.

    The aunt’s name is Wanda Gruz.  The time is the early 1960s and Wanda has had a successful career as a prosecutor and a judge in Communist Poland.  Now in her forties, she’s bitterly disillusioned with the regime and loathes herself for being its functionary, especially for sanctioning political executions; she drinks heavily and sleeps around.  It’s Wanda who matter-of-factly tells her niece, when Anna turns up at her apartment, that her real name is Ida Lebenstein and about the fate of her Jewish parents.  She takes Anna/Ida to the smallholding where Wanda believes the killing took place and the two women try to discover from the man who now lives there – and subsequently from his elderly, ailing father (whom Wanda believes hid her sister and brother-in-law before betraying them) – where the bodies are buried.  It transpires that the killings were carried out not by the older man but by Feliks, the younger one, when he was a teenager; and that the victims included Wanda’s own son, left in the care of her sister so that Wanda could concentrate on her work for the Polish Resistance.  When Anna asks why she was spared, Feliks explains that she was too young and fair-haired for anyone to know that she was Jewish, unlike her ‘dark and circumcised’ older cousin.

    During her visit, Anna also accompanies Wanda to a club that she frequents.  It’s here that the younger woman, still wearing her religious uniform, experiences jazz for the first time and, in particular, a good-looking saxophonist called Lis.  She finds his playing of a John Coltrane piece captivating; Anna’s unusual attractiveness has a similar effect on Lis.  There’s an immediate spark between Agata Trzebuchowska’s Anna and Dawid Ogrodnik, who plays the saxophonist (very well), yet it’s hard at first to tell how much Anna is drawn physically to Lis.  Wanda, irritated by Anna’s religious piety, has asked earlier in the film if she ever has impure thoughts.  Anna admits that she does but her answer to Wanda’s next question – ‘Carnal thoughts?’ – is no.   Besides, Agata Trzebuchowska is nothing if not inscrutable.  Her appealingly childish, Slavic-featured face holds the camera but gives little away – her response to the news that she’s ethnically Jewish appears as dispassionate as Wanda’s informing her of it sounded.  Once the family graves have been found, Anna returns to the convent but apologises to God that she’s not ready to take her vows.  She watches her peers taking theirs then goes back outside, in the direction of her aunt’s apartment.

    The experiences of recent days have depressed Wanda beyond the point of no return:  she turns up the volume on a piece of Mozart on her record player and commits suicide, stepping out of the high apartment window in the straightforward manner in which she revealed to her niece her Jewish origins.  Pawel Pawlikowski then cuts to Anna in the same room that Wanda has exited.  Anna puts on not only the Mozart record but also one of Wanda’s slinky dresses; she smokes a cigarette and consumes alcohol greedily.  She then returns to the night club.  When Anna first met Lis, my reaction was to think it was a pity they wouldn’t be able to get together but I needn’t have worried.  They now go to bed at his place.  In their post-coital conversation, Anna asks what happens next.  Lis says they’ll get a dog, get married, have children (I’m sure the dog came first) – in other words, live the sort of life that people live in a non-celibate world.  Anna smiles in response but, when she wakes next morning, she leaves Wanda’s dress and high heels on the floor, puts on her novice habit and goes back to the convent, presumably ready – now that she’s had sex and been given a clue of what she can expect to follow it – to take her vows and dedicate her life to God.  I’m not sure if her decision is meant to be surprising but it wasn’t to me.  I couldn’t help thinking the clinching factor was the prospect of marrying someone who, however charming he might be in other respects, was always going to be playing jazz.  I could see why entering a closed order for the rest of your life might be a preferable alternative.

    The black and white images of Ida are meticulously composed and lit (the cinematographers are Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski) but the visual studiedness is intrusive, sometimes counterproductive.  When the jazz band first appears, it’s apparently late in the evening and the club is pretty deserted.  Pawel Pawlikowski shows Lis and his colleagues in the background; in the foreground is a littered floor.  Each of the pieces of litter looks perfectly placed – the detritus has the quality not of mess but of set dressing.  Pawlikowski often positions people low in the frame (occasionally with their faces cut off at the mouth) – they are dominated by the blank exterior of buildings or the minimally decorated walls of the convent chapel or the nuns’ cells.  This is certainly distinctive but I struggled to understand its meaning (it’s not as if the human beings ‘don’t matter’ compared with where they live).  In contrast, the shot of Feliks (Adam Szyszkowski) confessing to the killings of Anna and Wanda’s family and hunkered down in the grave he’s just excavated, is too emphatically claustrophobic.  Just as blatantly fancy is the image of Anna, once she’s wearing Wanda’s dress etc, wrapped in a transparent curtain and swivelling drunkenly in her aunt’s apartment.  I did like a shot, held for some time, in which Anna and Lis stand next to each other, with her left and his right elbow so close together that it’s hard to tell whether they’re touching or if she is avoiding touch.

    Agata Kulesza’s performance as Wanda has been particularly praised and won prizes at festivals and this year’s Best Actress ‘Eagle’ in Poland’s national film awards.  (Dawid Ogrodnik won the Best Actor Eagle at the same awards for a different film, Life Feels Good, in which he plays a man with cerebral palsy.)  Kulesza, a big name in Poland, is a strong presence although I found her playing actressy compared with that of the rest of the cast, which also includes Jerzy Trela, as Feliks’ father, doing a familiar turn:  a person on their deathbed gasps out significant-but-cryptic remarks.  There are omissions in the script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Pawlikowski that are frustrating and/or convenient.   Has Wanda tried before to locate the family graves (if not, why not)?  How do the convent powers-that-be react to Anna’s deciding against taking her vows and heading out a second time?   Does Lis find Anna, in her femme fatale get-up, attractive in the same way he did when she was dressed in a habit?  (He doesn’t remark on the wardrobe change.)    Pawlikowski, as well as Agata Kulesza, has been honoured for Ida, which was awarded Best Film in last year’s London Film Festival; but, beneath the impressive control and construction of its chilly images, the film seemed to me unimaginative – even clichéd in the way that Anna turns temporarily into Wanda/a woman of the world.   I suspect it’s because Ida deals with ethnic and political identity and guilt so obviously (and on the surface) that critics have decided it must have creative insights into these themes.

    30 September 2014

     

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